25 July 2014

What eBay Hath Wrought 95: A Warning Against Drowsy Bidding


There are usually a couple of pop culture or non-baseball sports figures in each year's Allen & Ginter set whose autographs and relics wind up on my must-have list. My 2014 list is made up of WWF wrestler The Iron Sheik and internet web series star/geek icon Felicia Day.

I won this Felicia Day relic card from 2014 Allen & Ginter after bidding on it accidentally while going through my saved searches on eBay before bed. I was convinced that I had bid on an autograph and not a relic card, so imagine my surprise when I got notification that I had won this card! Thankfully bidding on this card was my only eBay activity on the evening, so there aren't any Hangover-style surprises showing up on my doorstep courtesy of a wild night on the eBay app.


On the bad side, I slightly overpaid for this card. I also was hoping to snag one of the multi-colored relics that are out there and instead got this plain gray one.

On the good side, at least I didn't wind up paying autograph prices for a relic card. This card's starting bid was probably high enough that most people passed on it anyway, and I didn't get bid up at all. I also knocked a card off of my want list, even though it was an error. Since this experience I have been careful to avoid the eBay app once I get past a certain threshold of drowsiness.

6 comments:

  1. Been guilty of that myself. Up in the middle of the night feeding the baby, I'd occasionally surf eBay and also win things I had no recollection of.

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    1. I am lucky that my wife handles most of the nighttime duties with our kids. I was overseas for the time when our twins were very little, and when our oldest son was a baby I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft, so I did that whenever I happened to be up with him and avoided the eBay trap.

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  2. I've done the same thing -- drowsily "deciding" to bid on something is a bad idea. But it's still a nice card to have!

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    1. Yes, it could have ended up much worse than it did. I only wound up paying about $3 more than I really wanted to pay for this card, so it's not a huge tragedy, just a reminder that bedtime browsing on eBay is not advisable.

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  3. I wrote a similar post a few months ago, but my incident involved Benadryl and it ended up costing me big time. The card sits on my desk at home as a reminder of the event.

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    1. Wow, your drug-addled mind really wanted that card. It's interesting that eBay can cause our brains to completely ignore the descriptions and photos in the auction and bid on things based on what we want to see rather than what is actually there.

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